Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 5, 1914 Excerpts from “Class War in Colorado” by Max Eastman
From The Masses of June 1914:
CLASS WAR IN COLORADO
Max Eastman
[Illustrated by M. H. Pancoast, John Sloan, and Art Young]
“FOR EIGHT DAYS it was a reign of terror. Armed miners swarmed into the city like soldiers of a revolution. They tramped the streets with rifles, and the red handkerchiefs around their necks, singing their war-songs. The Mayor and the sheriff fled, and we simply cowered in our houses waiting No one was injured here-they policed the streets day and night. But destruction swept like a flame over the mines.” These are the words of a Catholic priest of Trinidad.
“But, father” I said, “where is it all going to end?”
He sat forward with a radiant smile.”War!” he answered. “Civil war between labor and capital!” His gesture was beatific.
“And the church-will the church do nothing to save us from this?”
“Yes, this is Colorado,” he said. “Colorado is ‘disgraced in the eyes of the nation’-but soon it will be the Nation!“
I have thought often of that opinion. And I have felt that soon it will, indeed, unless men of strength and understanding, seeing this fight is to be fought, determine it shall be fought by the principals with economic and political arms, and not by professional gunmen and detectives.
Many reproaches will fall on the heads of the Rockefeller interests for acts of tyranny, exploitation, and contempt of the labor laws of Colorado-acts which are only human at human’s worst. They have gone out to drive back their cattle with a lash. For them that is natural. But I think the cool collecting for this purpose of hundreds of degenerate adventurers in blood from all the slums and vice camps of the earth, arming them with high power rifles, explosive and soft-nosed bullets, and putting them beyond the law in uniforms of the national army, is not natural. It is not human. It is lower, because colder, than the blood-lust of the gunmen themselves.
[…..]
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
BE IT KNOWN by these presents that 120 soldiers of the Colorado National Guard are enrolled as the founders and charter members of the Order of Patriotic Mutineers, for distinguished and heroic service in refusing to obey the Command of their superior officers to entrain for Trinidad for the purpose of shooting down their fellowmen and fellow-countrymen on strike for the betterment of life.
And that these soldiers of the Colorado National Guard, having thus instituted one of the great movements of history in these United States, are herewith commended to posterity for the reward of immortality for this act of patriotism and humanity.
Signed and Sealed on this twenty-sixth day of April, nineteen-hundred fourteen by The Masses Magazine for THE CIVILIZED WORLD ——————————————-
When that blaze appeared, Louis Tikas, who had left the [Ludlow] tent colony for a moment, started back to the rescue of those women and children who would be suffocated in the hole. He knew they were there. He was captured by the soldiers then. Is it likely he did not tell his captor where he was going and what for? The women and children were left dying, and Louis Tikas was taken to the track and murdered by K. E. Linderfelt of his subordinates.
Linderfelt is a man who had his taste of blood in the Philippines, in the Boer War, and with Madero in Mexico. He was second in command of this gang-a lieutenant. “Shoot every son-of-a-bitchin’ thing you see moving!” is what a train-inspector heard him shout at the station. And in that command from that man, brought here by the Rockefeller interests as an expert in human slaughter, you have the whole story of this carnage and its cause.
[…..]
I think the palest lover of “peace,” after viewing the flattened ruins of the little colony of homes, the open death-hole, the shattered bedsteads, the stoves, the household trinkets broken and black-and the larks still singing over them in the sun-the most bloodless would find joy in going up the valleys to feed his eyesight upon tangles of gigantic machinery and ashes that had been the operating capital of the mines. It is no retribution, it is no remedy, but it proves that the power and the courage of action is here.
[Emphasis added.]
“Groping for the Light” by S. Sparks
“John D Rockefeller Jr testifies before the Investigating Committee that he is groping for the light on the Colorado situation.” -News Item
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